We don’t want coffee that hot. That’s the fucking lie, stooge. McDonald’s own market research shows that the overwhelming majority of their customers drink their coffee immediately in their car. Serving it burnt to crap and too hot to drink quickly is actively terrible for the vast majority of their customers, which is why even McDonald’s doesn’t actually serve coffee that hot anymore. They stopped doing that over a decade ago.

Do you really expect me to believe some corporate ass-kisser that makes lawyer jokes like they think they’re being insightful actually knows anything about doing a honest days work. We don’t have time to casually sit around the office sipping coffee all day. We have to slam that shit and get to work, yuppie.

You don’t have to give up your ability to defend yourself in the world that actually exists to fight for a better one. That’s childish thinking.

Oh goodie, so now we’ve reached the point where you’re trying to flood the argument with so much meaningless gibberish that you hope it’ll fool someone into thinking that you’re making point somewhere in that mess. I don’t care that you have creamer in your coffee, dude. I don’t really even care that you think a meat thermometer can accurately measure the temperature of liquids. Sure, you can take a tiny sip of 185° coffee. Whatever.

The facts of the matter are that 185° is hotter than any other chain serves their coffee, they received multiple health code violations for it, serving it at even slightly lower temperatures dramatically reduces the possibility of getting severe burns, McDonald’s knew all this, lied about why they were doing it, ordered their employees to keep getting health code violations anyway, settled with other people out of court before this case for upwards of $500,000 because it was such a small expense for them, only offered this lady $800 for some bizarre reason, the judge actually reduced the settlement to $640,000 before it was actually paid out, and she ended up spending all that money on a live in nurse because she was in so much pain and barely capable of walking for the rest of her life. We do not base our regulations on the assumption that no one will spill any coffee ever. That is an insane thing to assume.

Have fun giving up your only defense against corporate negligence though. I’m sure that could never possibly backfire.

You have to boil water to make coffee. You don’t have to serve it still boiling. That is, again, actually against the law to do the way they did it. They were already in trouble for it before they gave that lady third degree burns. They had to go out of their way to set their warmer to boiling, because it’s McDonald’s. They don’t actually make every cup of coffee custom for you. It just comes out of warmer that they get to set the temperature of, and setting that to be too hot to drink would be stupid even if it didn’t burn the crap out of the coffee and leave it tasting like charcoal. They had to knowingly and intentionally break the law to serve coffee that hot. You just got played by your corporate overlords trying to pretend they’re the victims.

No, he’s right, that’s clearly on the flap on the lid that gets folded inside the box. You can only read that while the box is open.

Coffee isn’t supposed to be served hot enough to give third degree burns causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills. That’s actually illegal. When the health department gives several warnings and a senior corporate executive orders employees to disobey the law, that makes judges very, very grumpy. Lawsuits are a stupid system, but they literally the only system we have for legally fighting back against corporations. There is nothing else you can do if they wrong you. Spreading the idea that you shouldn’t sue is only taking away your only method of defending yourself within the law. You are being a corporate shill right now.

That’s a separate point in the same case, but yes. The judge also ruled to allow google to keep paying for search engine placement.

Almost all health care research in the US was funded by the NIH. So, uh, oops. The very tiny amount of research that pharmaceutical companies do with their own money is just excuses for extending patents on profitable drugs. Real research has always been funded with taxpayer money, even in the US. That isn’t even included in that chart for how expensive US healthcare is, either.

It’s called fascism. That’s the name that Mussolini made up for the thing he was doing. The merging of state and corporate power under a populist strongman of a nationalist authoritarian government. That’s what the word fascism actually means when it’s not just being used as a petty insult.

But that’s kinda my point. He’s not just a wanna be dictator. He is the fascist leader of a fascist movement, and his supports are fascists, even if they don’t like that terminology. Fascism isn’t just a mean word for politician I don’t like. It’s an actual populist political ideology. The whole movement is fascist. Not just the guy at the head.

Well, obviously. It’s just that a nationalist, authoritarian government led by a populist strongman merging corporate and state power is the primary goal of fascism. We really shouldn’t think it’s hypocritical or surprising when the fascists support fascism. That’s what they do.

Merging corporate and government power is not at all the same thing as the workers seizing the means of production.

Or alternatively they’ve only ever had temperatures below 0°.

Litterally everything we have ever made and called an AI is an algorithm. Just because we’ve made algorithms for making bigger, more complicated algorithms we don’t understand doesn’t mean it’s actually anything fundamentally different. Look at input, run numbers, give output. That’s all there ever has been. That’s how thermostats work, and it’s also how LLMs work. It’s only gotten more complicated. It has never actually changed.

The phrase AI has never actually meant that though? It’s just a machine that can take in information and make decisions. A thermostat is an AI. And not a fancy modern one either. I’m talking about an old bi-metallic strip in a plastic box. That’s how the phrase has always been used outside of sci-fi, where it usually is used to talk about superintelligent general intelligences. The problem isn’t that people are calling LLMs AI. The problem is that the billionaires who run everything are too stupid to understand that difference.

I mean, the entire first point I made there was about how that was meaningless. Having the exact same chemical called a “chemical” sometimes and not others actively hurts our ability to communicate about what’s in our food. That’s not your fault, but it still bothers me.

The problem with that is that it is a completely meaningless distinction. Some of the worst chemicals we often put in our foods are certain kinds of nitrates that are used as preservatives, but those same nitrates occur naturally in celery. If you just eat celery the concentration is low enough to be harmless, but it can be concentrated naturally. If you’ve ever seen celery juice or celery powder on the list of ingredients for a food it is the exact same thing, and just as bad for you.

Naturally occurring isn’t the same as healthy. Most plants are some degree of poisonous. They don’t want to be eaten, and can’t run away. That’s just how they defend themselves. We farm the ones we are well adapted to eat, but even with that and millennia of selective breeding it’s still not perfect. Ultra processed foods are bad for you because your health is not a priority for the people doing the processing, not because there is something inherently worse about industrially synthesized ingredients. They can be anything we want, and they are currently mostly addictive and only satisfying for a very short amount of time, but that is a decision, not an inherent flaw.

What, you aren’t on the dark matter diet yet?

Yes, because it gives them full legal access to share basically everything ever published by the US government. It’s not a magic bullet for all their woes or anything, but it is one less thing to worry about.

Mmm, yes. I too love eating metals that explode when they touch water. Extra spicy. It does more than double the sodium content of your salt though, so watch out for that if you have high blood pressure.